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All IPCC definitions taken from Climate Change 2007: The Physical Science Basis. Working Group I Contribution to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Annex I, Glossary, pp. 941-954. Cambridge University Press.

A climate hawk separates energy thought experiments from road maps

Updated, Jan. 29, 10:50 p.m. | David Roberts, the progressive environmental blogger who coined the phrase “climate hawk,” has done the environmental community a great service with a Grist post stressing the difference between a vision of a climate-safe energy future and a strategy for making that vision a reality.

One of his core lines is:

[M]ost decarbonization scenarios are thought experiments, not practical roadmaps. But when they are reported to the public, that distinction is often lost.

Marking the difference is essential unless you want to give the public a false sense that it’ll be easy to satisfy the world’s energy needs without overheating the planet.

China nears peak coal, but its rustbelt pays the price

China’s great coal boom is grinding to a halt, and the consequences for both the global climate and hundreds of millions of Chinese factory workers could be dramatic.

Three trends have dominated the debate over China and climate change for the past decade: China’s economy will grow by double digits, the country will burn more coal every year, and global emissions will continue to climb with no end in sight. China has grown to be the world’s second largest economy and the No. 1 emitter of greenhouse gases, consuming nearly as much coal as the rest of the world combined.

But preliminary data from 2014 show that China’s coal production just declined 2.5 percent, the first drop since the year 2000. Analysts are now predicting what was almost unimaginable just a few years ago: China’s coal use could peak and begin to decline by 2020.

That dramatic shift would put China on track to meet its treaty pledge of peaking total emissions in 2030. Falling demand for coal reflects strict new pollution controls, growing renewable energy use, and an economic shift away from coal-intensive infrastructure development.

Climate change is altering the global heat engine

Cllimate scientists have been warning for a while that as the planet heats up, storms will become fewer but stronger. This trend has been seen in a variety of historical data tracking wind speed, rain and snow over the past century or so. Now a team of researchers has figured out why, and the explanation is firmly rooted in atmospheric thermodynamics. Global warming is intensifying the world’s water cycle, and that drains energy from the air circulation that drives stormy weather, say Frederic Laliberté of the University of Toronto and his colleagues.

The researchers “have offered a thermodynamic explanation for what the models have been doing all along,” says Olivier Pauluis of New York University, who wrote an accompanying perspective article on the study.

Earth's atmosphere acts like a gigantic heat engine, working on many of the same principles as your car’s engine. Fuel—in this case, energy from the sun—is used to do work. Because more sunlight hits the tropics than higher latitudes, the planet constantly redistributes heat via air motions. Those air motions are the engine’s work. They also help produce the rainstorms and snowstorms that can ruin your day. The engine isn't 100-percent efficient, though. Some heat is lost to space. And much of the remaining energy is expended in the planet’s water cycle, used in the evaporation and precipitation of water.

Climate change’s bottom line

It was 8 degrees in Minneapolis on a recent January day, and out on Interstate 394, snow whipped against the windshields of drivers on their morning commutes. But inside the offices of Cargill, the food conglomerate, Greg Page, the company’s executive chairman, felt compelled to talk about global warming.

“It would be irresponsible not to contemplate it,” Mr. Page said, bundled up in a wool sport coat layered over a zip-up sweater. “I’m 63 years old, and I’ve grown up in the upper latitudes. I’ve seen too much change to presume we might not get more.”

Climate change "refugees" off the agenda, but problem looms large

The days when newspapers ran headlines about the hundreds of millions of climate change refugees who'd be knocking on the doors of rich countries in the coming decades are long gone. Experts in environmental migration are not exactly mourning the loss.

In the past few years, as researchers have deepened their understanding of how climatic stresses are pushing people to move, they have stopped making predictions about the numbers and started talking about the complexity of the phenomenon.

Recently we ran a story about how impoverished villagers on the mud flats of Pakistan's south coast are being forced to move inlanda few kilometres due to a combination of sea-level rise, storm surges, flooding and land erosion - a far cry from the early spectre of mass migration across borders.

Most Americans support government action on climate change, poll finds

An overwhelming majority of the American public, including half of Republicans, support government action to curb global warming, according to a poll conducted by The New York Times, Stanford University and the nonpartisan environmental research group Resources for the Future.

In a finding that could have implications for the 2016 presidential campaign, the poll also found that two-thirds of Americans say they are more likely to vote for political candidates who campaign on fighting climate change. They are less likely to vote for candidates who question or deny the science that determined that humans caused global warming.

Among Republicans, 48 percent said they are more likely to vote for a candidate who supports fighting climate change, a result that Jon A. Krosnick, a professor of political science at Stanford University and an author of the survey, called “the most powerful finding” in the poll. Many Republican candidates either question the science of climate change or do not publicly address the issue.

With fossil fuels growing as sources of electricity across the globe, the IEA sees nuclear power as a stable source of low-carbon power helping to take polluting coal-fired plants offline.

Nuclear power needs to double to meet warming goal

Since the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear accident in Japan chilled global attitudes toward nuclear power, the world has been slowly reconciling its discomfort with nuclear and the idea that it may have a role to play in reducing greenhouse gas emissions to tackle climate change.

The International Energy Agency and the Nuclear Energy Agency suggest in a report released Thursday that nuclear will have such a significant role to play in climate strategy that nuclear power generation capacity will have to double by 2050 in order for the world to meet the international 2°C (3.6°F) warming goal.

Obama Moves To Protect Against Flooding From Rising Sea Levels

President Barack Obama issued an executive order on Friday directing federal, state and local agencies to incorporate projections for sea level rise in planning and construction along the coasts.

The new Federal Flood Risk Management Standard requires that all federally funded projects located in floodplains, including buildings and roads, be built to withstand flooding. The requirement, the White House said in a release Friday, would “reduce the risk and cost of future flood disasters” and “help ensure federal projects last as long as intended.”

“It is the policy of the United States to improve the resilience of communities and Federal assets against the impacts of flooding,” the order states. “These impacts are anticipated to increase over time due to the effects of climate change and other threats. Losses caused by flooding affect the environment, our economic prosperity, and public health and safety, each of which affects our national security.”

The world can live better and fight climate change, UK report says

The world can improve living standards for all while cutting climate-changing emissions to keep to an internationally agreed limit for global warming, a team led by the British government said on Wednesday.

It launched an online calculatorallowing businesses, governments, researchers and the public to explore how different ways of pursuing economic development to 2050 will shape carbon emissions and rising temperatures.

Even though the world's population is set to rise to 10 billion by 2050 from 7 billion today, the tool shows it is possible for everyone to eat well, travel further and live in more comfortable homes, without pushing global temperature rise above 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit), the UK's Department of Energy and Climate Change said.

But to achieve that, we must use energy more efficiently, shift away from fossil fuels, protect forests and make smarter use of land, it added.

U.S. EPA chief hopes pope will spur concern on climate change

The head of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency said on Friday she hoped Pope Francis' upcoming message to his flock on the environment would help galvanize concern about climate change and convince sceptics that "the science is real".

EPA administrator Gina McCarthy, visiting the Vatican to discuss climate change, said U.S. President Barack Obama shared the pope's belief that it was a moral issue because its effects would be felt most by the poorest and weakest nations.

"The pope knows his own beliefs and I want him to know that the president is aligned with him on these issues," she told reporters.

We can solve climate change, but it won’t be cheap or easy

Pretty much everyone who acknowledges the problem of climate change is hungry for good news about it, which makes sense, as most of the news is overwhelming and awful. There is high demand for optimism — I hear it every time someone asks me to write or speak on climate — so inevitably there is supply.

Why is the 'Climate President' approving more oil drilling?

Something doesn't compute here.

Last week, President Obama rightly declared in his State of the Union address: "No challenge poses a greater threat to future generations than climate change."

This week, the Obama administration announced plans open up the Atlantic Ocean to oil and gas drilling and offer more lease sales in the sensitive Arctic waters off Alaska. Ramping up offshore drilling will not only raise the risk of disastrous oil spills and threats to wildlife, but will also deepen our dependence on the very fossil fuels driving us into the global climate crisis.

Here's the thing about dealing with global warming: You can't say you want to make it better and then do the opposite. Rhetoric won't curb carbon dioxide emissions and poetic speeches won't stop the seas from rising and the planet from warming.

Comments

Really enjoyed Dave Robert's article, and also Revkin's support of Dave's views on this. I was sad to see Joe Romm attacking their pragmatic approach :( We need some serious planning to actually move forward on this issue, as opposed to Romm's 'Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead' attitude. We also need to present a unified front on Climate issues in general, this kind of infighting is well noted (and laughed at) by the 'opposition', if you get my meaning.

Unfortunately the reluctance to accept the importance of significant action towards the changes of the way the most fortunate enjoy their life is very popular and powerful among those who are the problem.

The successful denial that their overconsuming enjoyment and pursuits are a problem is the real problem. The popularity of that attitude fuels the profitability of activity that is clearly understood to be unaccepable.

Through the past 25 years, the combined power of the profitability and popularity of a lack of concern for the future has created the horrible present day situation. As mentioned, there now is little chance of avoiding significant future consequences. And there is significant resistance among the real trouble makers to any action that would be a 'sacrifice to their potential to personally benefit more just for the potential benefit of others, no matter how minor their sacrifice is compared to the magnitude of trouble others would face if the sacrifice was not made'.

The ability of people to personally succeed through activity that clearly has no long term future, and actually adds to the future challenges to be overcome by others, distracts effort from the important essential tasks that need to be focused on.

It is clear that the socio-economic-political system has never been very good at developing toward a sustainable better futre for all. It actually has no interest in that type of development. It even motivates people to try to get as much wealth and power no matter how unacceptable their means are, because there is ample evidence that unacceptable activity can be gotten away with.

That is the barrier to the amount and type of research and development that is required.

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